Have many photographers here shot for Suicide Girls?
What do you make of it? Worthwhile?
Its an interesting business model. On one hand they do offer payment to the photographer which is nice, but only if the shoot is selected as Shoot Of The Day. One of their requirement is that the shoot must contain a minimum of 40 images. That's quite a lot of work if you're planning to retouch images to a high quality. To put that into context the shoot above was one I shot for SG and put 12 - 15 hours of editing time in across a few days, along with roughly 2 hours shooting time on the day. Lets say for arguments sake it was 16 hours in total.
That shoot got selected as Shoot of the Day and I had to spend a further significant amount of time filling in the paperwork with them and getting up to speed on their contract and terms etc. I won't even factor that into my time. Eventually I was sent a cheque for 200 US dollars, roughly equaling 160 euro.
Basically that shoot worked out as paying an even 10 euro an hour for the work I put in. When you consider the legal minimum wage in Ireland is currently €9.55 an hour thats not so good.
Now in the interest of being fair. I didn't need to put in that much time editing. Steph the model I shot with is absolutely stunning and doesnt need much editing. I just like working to a certain standard with my photography and proper retouching is a slow enough process. Yes I could have rushed it, slapped on a few quick filters/plugins, but then it may not have been chosen as SOTD, and then there would be no payment at all.
If you compare that to the business model on Steemit its worlds apart. Users upload content on here and are fairly rewarded, at least for anyone willing to persevere and put in the work. I know some posts get better or worse responses and its not always about the quality or effort put in. I've had posts I spent far longer on that fell flat, compared to posts that didn't take long at all which did really well. The point is that perseverance, good work and good content on here seems to be a pretty reliable way to generate a good fair reward for the content we create.
Comparing that to the barely legal minimum wage reward I got from the SG shoot, I know where my efforts are going in future.
Here are bigger versions of those images in case anyone wants to see. I've kept this image SFW, but as you can imagine there were NSFW in the shoot too. I didn't think it was appropriate for this post, but if theres any interest I could post them another time.
